Abstract
This chapter utilizes Schutzian analysis to understand public opinion about issues like global climate change. The central point of the argument is that public opinion is not simply an aggregation of individual opinions. Instead, public opinion represents what Berger and Luckmann (The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. Doubleday, 1966, p. 67) call the intersubjective sedimentation of collective experience. It is a reality sui generis. Public opinion is an element of subjective experience derived not from our originary experiences but from our interactions in a shared social and cultural matrix in which sedimented social meanings are disseminated using a sign system (language). To successfully make this point will require an inquiry into the nature of opinion in individual experience, an issue about which Schutz curiously had little to say. To understand opinion it will be necessary to investigate Schutz’s phenomenological conceptions of experience, leaning heavily on his discussions of sedimentation and typification, an understanding of which will allow us to see public opinion as resulting from intersubjective sedimentation on the group level.
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Notes
- 1.
For example, in regard to global warming see Shwom et al. (2015).
- 2.
For a discussion of perceptions of local weather and their connection to global climate see Szafran, Williams and Roth Robert Szafran, Jerry Williams, and Jeffery Roth. 2013. “If Local Weather Was Our Only Indicator: Modeling Length of Time to Majority Belief in Climate Change.” Simulation and Gaming 44(2–3): 409–426.
- 3.
Intersubjective sedimentation is closely related to Durkheim’s (1984, p. 117) collective consciousness. Durkheim defines collective consciousness as: “the totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or common consciousness. Undoubtedly the substratum of this consciousness does not consist of a single organ. By definition it is diffused over society as a whole, but nonetheless possesses specific characteristics that make it a distinctive reality.”
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Williams, J. (2023). Understanding Opinions: A Phenomenological Analysis. In: Belvedere, C., Gros, A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Macrophenomenology and Social Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34712-2_6
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